The Biggest Danger In a Dangerous World

I think almost everybody would agree that these are dangerous times, perhaps the most dangerous times most of us have faced.  But where we may disagree is as to what the biggest problem is.  Some will say it is COVID-19.  Others will say it is climate change or systemic racism.  Figuring out how to restart the economy is the biggest for some.  And still others will argue it is polarization and the inability of our political leaders in Washington to do almost anything.  Legitimate arguments can be made on behalf of any of these (and others), but I see it as something else: the world.

In a talk to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs on June 26, Robert Gates, former Secretary of Defense under both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama,¹ compared the situation in the world today not to the 1930s, which was suggested by the question he was asked, but to the early 1900s, the time before World War I.  As before World War I, there are a number of competitors for power today, some world and some regional.  There are no effective international organizations.  There is a rising world power (then Germany, now China).  And there are tensions around the world, with forces deployed around the world, too.

As for the United States, while Secretary Gates did not mention it, in the early 1900s, the United States was largely irrelevant in much of the world, except in the western hemisphere (and maybe a few other places, such as the Philippines).  Which is seeming to be more and more true today.  At the end of May, German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced that she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, come to the G-7 meeting President Trump was hosting in Washington, D.C., because of Covid-19 concerns.²  President Trump was upset,³ but according to Walter Russell Mead in The Wall Street Journal, it’s unclear how much Germany cared:

“The president is not exactly irrelevant to Berlin’s thinking.  But the German sense seems to be that there is little to gain by trying to work with Mr. Trump and little to lose by ignoring him.”

You can see much the same thing in Hong Kong now.  It is one thing for President Xi Jinping of China to do what he has been doing to the Uighurs, etc., inside China.  To do what he is doing in Hong Kong is different.  It indicates a near-total disregard for what the United States may say. Some of this may be because he thinks President Trump doesn’t care.  But it could just as easily be that President Xi doesn’t care what U.S. says because President Trump isn’t relevant.   It’s as if he thinks, like Chancellor Merkel, that there is little to be gained or lost by worrying about President Trump.

In his talk, Secretary Gates worried about the world blundering into another war, like it did in the summer of 1914.  With all the tensions around the world, in the South China Sea, Iran, North Korea, and maybe even Russia, he saw risks of an incident escalating into something out of control.

Which brings up former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s new book.  Ambassador Bolton described Mr. Trump as “stunningly uninformed” in foreign policy and said there was “no coherent basis, no strategy, no philosophy” to President Trump’s foreign policy.  According to Ambassador Bolton, Trump “believed he could run the Executive Branch and establish national-security policies on instinct, relying on personal relationships with foreign leaders.”  In effect, he thought he could run the United States’ foreign policy like he apparently ran his businesses (though as I have said before, I think that is a bad way to run a business, too.⁴)

While I am not surprised by Ambassador Bolton’s comments (I never expected President Trump would have a foreign policy philosophy; that’s one of the reasons I didn’t vote for him), I am concerned by them.  The lack of an even semi-predictable foreign policy can lead to confusion and uncertainty as to how the United States might react in particular situations.  The problem is that, when countries are uncertain as to what other countries might do or might not do, mistakes can be made.  And the more the uncertainty or the graver the situation, the bigger the potential mistakes.  Mistakes aren’t good.  Big mistakes are worse.  It’s been a long time since the world has seen a really big mistake.  The USSR trying to put missiles in Cuba.  North Korea invading South Korea.  Hitler thinking England and France wouldn’t follow through on their promises to Poland.

Sometimes mistakes can be walked back, like the Cuban missile crisis, but sometimes they can’t.  You can’t rely on the hope that mistakes can be walked back.  You need to reduce confusion and uncertainty, so fewer mistakes get made and the ones that do get made are smaller.  We need to avoid, or at least greatly minimize, incidents that could wind up escalating out of control. 

The question is how to do it.  Some think the answer is simple: Elect President Trump’s opponent in November.  Such a view is probably held by many in the United States.  Good old Joe Biden.  Just elect him and things will be back to the way there were before President Trump.  The United States will regain its respect and will be a world leader again.  But is this true?  Paul Krugman has his doubts.  In a talk to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs on June 3, Mr. Krugman said that it is hard to get trust and leadership back after you lose it.  After all, he said, even with President Trump gone, we would still be the country that elected him; we could do it again. 

In fact, I would say that the leadership and trust question go back further than President Trump.  I have been asking “Why should anybody trust us” for a long time.  (See, inter alia, here and here.)  Consider the red line that Barack Obama set with respect to Syria’s use of chemical weapons and then ignored at the last minute.  While President Obama looked like he was leading when he signed the Paris Climate Change Accords and negotiated the Iran Nuclear Pact, other countries have to notice, even if they don’t say it publicly, that he couldn’t get Congress to approve either of them, which allowed his successor to back out of both of them. 

Others would point to George W. Bush and his invasion of Iraq.  Was it necessary?  And even if it was, how badly was it handled?

Regardless of when the trust question started, after President Trump, after the ignored red line in Syria, etc., will other countries feel confident in relying on us in the same way again?  Or will they decide that they need to look somewhere else for their security?  Even if they do work with us again, won’t there always be that nagging doubt about whether we, or at least our next president, will be there for them?

When Secretary Gates was asked who, in the November election, was most likely to deal with the issues and concerns that he had raised, his answer probably surprised many in the audience.  Because he said he wasn’t sure.  He noted he had said negative things about both candidates in the past.⁴  He also said that neither of the candidates is talking about these issues, so there really is no basis to judge between them.  Neither candidate or party has coherent ideas on how to address the issues he raised and nobody is talking about what role the U.S. should play in the world.

But we not only need the candidates and parties to have coherent ideas on the role the U.S. should play in the world, we need them to talk to the American people about those ideas, too.  The candidates and the parties need to tell us what their ideas are and what they will do.  And they need to convince the American people on the role the United States needs to play in the world and how that role can make the world a better and safer place, not just for the rest of the world, but for us, too.  A failure to do that is the danger I am most worried about.
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¹ As well as former many other things.
² Much the same things happened to President Obama in 2015.  The Administration called for a meeting at Camp David between President Obama and the leaders of the six nations of the Gulf Cooperation Council to get their support for the Iran nuclear agreement.  But the Kings of both Saudi Arabia and Bahrain announced that they would not be coming and that they would just send their crown princes.  (See here.) 
³ In a what looks like a fit of pique, the Trump administration decided shortly thereafter that it would be withdrawing 9,000 troops from Germany by September.  While the Administration claimed that the withdrawal had been under consideration since September, it’s hard to believe that the timing of the announcement was not affected by Chancellor’s Merkel decision to skip the meeting.
⁴ I can't quickly find the reference to this.  I will add it when I find it. [UPDATE (7/26/20 12:50 pm): Here's a link.]
⁵ See here for his comments about former Vice President Biden